At one of the project meetings, it was highlighted that our selected video service provider isn’t the easiest to reach from some parts of the world. So I was assigned the task of finding an alternative/complimentary service that would be acceptable.

The decision I came to, and confirmed with others that they were happy, was to use YouTube as a complimentary service to BlipTV. So yes people we now have an Official YouTube channel. I’d like to say a huge thanks to Leslie Hawthorn for enabling this for us, and the fine folks over at Google & YoutTube. There is very little content on there at the moment, but that will change shortly as I will sync the content from BlipTV across.

The rationale for keeping BlipTV as our primary provider is:
* They allow people to download the original video file without having to login etc. This is great as it means we can keep providing video in open formats for all to consume.
* It provides us with the means of centralising distribution of all the videos. We upload to BlipTV and they take care of adding it to YouTube and anywhere else we want (should we upload to Facebook too?)
* They’re a great bunch of guys & gals who are very responsive to support requests and general queries – their customer service is superb!
* Oh and last but by no means least, they’re big OpenSourcers using Linux (granted it’s Gentoo but we like the Gentoo community don’t we? 🙂 ), and a wealth of open source software (ffmpeg, gstreamer etc).

This means that the likes of tube.o.o may well be removed in the near future, as all the content will be stored online and offered to the widest possible audience, without a strain on any resources on openSUSE’s end. If anyone has any issues with either service please let me know.

Well it’s been almost seven months since our inaugural conference, and there were a load of videos taken. The problem was that our usual VT gurus have been unavailable to do any of the editing etc. So the raw video has languished on the servers waiting for some kind soul to help edit them.

After multiple calls for help and nudges from the marketing team, I decided to see if I could slot it in anywhere (yay me, I’m such a hero :-P) Thankfully I had some brilliant help from SankarP who refreshed my memory on how to edit video, thanks chief!

Currently only Day 1 of the conference is available, you can view online (flash) or download (ogg) the talks from the openSUSE TV channel on BlipTV. I am working on getting a channel on YouTube to enable a wider reach, as some people have bandwidth issues with Blip. You can also subscribe to the feeds in multiple formats – rss, miro, itunes.

If anyone has any openSUSE related video that they would like put on the channel, then please let me know 🙂

It is almost one week after the 10th edition FOSDEM (Free Software Developers European Meeting) (http://fosdem.org/2010/) took place in the city of Brussels. As is usual, lots of Free Software developers, promotors and fans attended to the event. Different from other years, this time I had the chance to live on my own the FOSDEM spirit and had the chance to meet some FLOSS supporters from different projects, seeing the almighty improved KDE 4.4 being successfully presented under 640×480 adverse projecting conditions. In addition to this, lots of openSUSE people at the openSUSE booth

For those of you who couldn’t attend to FOSDEM or for those who attended and want to see it again, here some of the videos of the talks are available for download. Additionally, you can visit the official FOSDEM youtube channel, enjoy… and don’t forget: Have a lot of fun

Lots of FLOSS people gathered at the past FOSDEM 2010

Lots of attention gathered the openSUSE 11.2 demo at the openSUSE booth at FOSDEM 2010

Some may know about the Geeko’s Tube, I’m not so sure that many do though. There has been for a while now tube.opensuse.org, this is the official repository of videos by openSUSE people. All the video is in .ogg format, and as such will play straight out of the box regardless of whether users are purists/pragmatists/whatever.

There are several services out on the web that offer video streaming in flash, one that caught my attention is blip.tv. So why is blip different to YouTube et al? Well for starters they openly use Open Source (they’re not ashamed of it), they support multiple formats for uploading and playback, and they provide multiple mechanisms to get your shows out there.

After some consultation on the mailing lists and IRC, I have created an openSUSE channel on blip.tv – http://opensuse.blip.tv The aim is for videos by the openSUSE Community for the openSUSE Community can get uploaded there and reach a much wider audience. There are only a few videos on there at the moment but the content will grow (I’m just having a few ISP issues over here :-/ ). So what content is able to go on there? The short answer is any, yes there are only a couple of catches: they must preferably be clean (remember the audience is varied from young to old), have an openSUSE twist (the whole reason for the channel). At present there are a few screencasts and some presentations by community members at events (granted they’re all employees, but that doesn’t make them any less a member of our community).

As the channel is syndicated via RSS you can subscribe to it using Banshee/Miro and it will automatically download the latest episode for you (sorry I haven’t tried in KDE, but I believe it should work). You can also add the RSS feed into your preferred reader and pull the attachments from there.

I would be really keen on getting people’s feedback and also if people have content they would like to get on there.